The Revolution in Horsemanship

The fascinating book by Dr. Miller and co-author Rick Lamb (Host of the radio broadcast The Horse Show). They document the extraordinary events of the past quarter century which are changing the ancient art of horsemanship from training to riding, tack, medicine, and more. Most significant, they suggest that the communication skills involved in this remarkable change can be used to facilitate human relationships. Illustrated with 100's of photos, 354 Pages. Available in both paperback and hard cover. Price does not include shipping or sales tax (Calif only).

Scroll down to for table of contents and to review the Table of Contents and Excerpts from the book.

"If you have little interest in
the world of horses and read this book you will become interested. If
you are already interested you will be enthralled". - From the forward by
Hugh Downs [Recently retired host of the ABC news program 20/20]

Part I of the
book describes how horsemen like Tom and
Bill Dorrance, Ray Hunt, Pat Parelli, and
others revolutionized horsemanship in the
final quarter of the 20th century. But,
perhaps even more significant, their methods
applied to human communications offer
renewed hope for improved relationships
between people. Chapter 20 addresses this
concept:

Chapter 20
The Real Importance of the Revolution

No one gets
into horses to become a better human being
or to find greater meaning in life or to
make the world a better place, but sometimes
that’s exactly what happens.

In the
beginning, you play with horses because it’s
fun. It’s a pleasant diversion. Then you
find that it feels good in a deeper and more
lasting way than many other recreational
past-times. You may love riding motorcycles,
but your Harley doesn’t nicker at you in the
morning. There is something very special
about a horse that makes you want to do
better with and for them.

But just
wanting it isn’t enough because this is
something very different and very unnatural
for us humans. It takes time and effort to
learn to communicate effectively with a
horse. You have to be willing to go back to
school, to learn and to change the way you
behave. You have to set your ego on the
shelf and leave it there while you reinvent
yourself as a horseman and, often, as a
human being.

This new
person observes, remembers and compares. He
listens more and talks less. He takes
responsibility rather than assigning blame.
He controls his emotions. He becomes aware
of his body language. He tries to improve
himself. He commits himself to acting
justly. He cultivates patience. He forgives.
He lives in the moment rather than stewing
over the past or waiting for the future. And
of course, he places the wants and needs of
another living creature ahead of his own.

He does it
all, at least in the beginning, because it
will make him a better horseman.

It isn’t easy.
We cannot wave a magic wand or drink a magic
potion and change the nature of our species
anymore than a leopard can change its spots.
It takes work and lots of it. It takes
willpower and persistence, focus and
thought. In an age of mindless entertainment
and instant gratification of our every
physical and emotional craving, those don’t
always come easy to us. But if we persist,
the payoff makes it all worthwhile.

Taking
it to the Street

The revolution
in horsemanship has given us the motivation
and means for meaningful self-improvement,
and the world outside of the horse industry
has taken notice. Major corporations, for
example, are finding that they can inspire a
different and better form of leadership,
build stronger, more effective teams and
foster a more enjoyable workplace by
incorporating the principles of the
revolution.

Some of these
corporations are coming to Monty Roberts for
help. Roberts has crafted a message of
trust-based management, using Join-Up® as a
metaphor, and has delivered it to companies
such as American Express, Johnson & Johnson,
Dean Witter, Disney, Hallmark, Chevron,
Pfizer, Volkswagen and John Deere.
Educators, psychologists, children with
autism, at-risk teens, victims and
victimizers have also benefited from
Roberts’ work.

Clinician
Frank Bell offers an all day, hands-on
horsemanship course for corporate employees
and clients as a means of developing
concentration and focus to better prepare
them for the challenges of the workplace.
Interestingly, it was the work of legendary
sales trainer Dale Carnegie (How to Win
Friends and Influence People) that
taught Bell the importance of making a good
first impression and inspired his 7-step
Safety System for preparing a horse to be
ridden. Now he is using horsemanship to help
people reach their full potential, bringing
him full circle.

Canadian
clinician Chris Irwin teaches Equine
Assisted Personal Development. E.A.P.D. is
an innovative form of “experiential” therapy
for people with a broad range of needs, from
troubled teens, to families in crisis, to
corporate teams seeking empowerment. Working
with the horse is the experience from which
the insights flow. Irwin sees the task
before the human as learning to communicate
and lead in terms the horse, or another
person for that matter, understands. He
calls it becoming the better horse.
He explains, “If we trainers, coaches and
therapists can facilitate people in learning
how to become ‘better horses’ then we are
assisting them in developing and balancing
essential life skills such as awareness,
focus, patience, empathy, assertiveness,
boundaries, consistency, clarity,
compassion, calm, courage and
multi-tasking.”

The horse is
truly a vehicle for not only transporting
but also elevating the human species, for
taking us closer to that elusive goal of
realizing human potential.

The Horse as
Therapy

That potential
is different for each of us. Some are born
with every advantage. They have healthy
bodies and minds, healthy home environments
in which to grow and go through life without
many real setbacks. For such people, the
possibilities are practically endless.

Other people
are burdened with tremendous disadvantages
from birth, spiral out of control through
poor life choices or suffer debilitating
injuries. What the horse can mean for them
is perhaps even more astounding.

For example,
two decades ago, one of the authors met an
intelligent and articulate young woman –
we’ll call her Terri – who had very little
function below her neck. A rare neurological
disease had robbed her of control of most of
her body. Although she had partial use of
one hand, she was, for all intents and
purposes, a quadriplegic.

Terri was the
founder of an Oregon therapeutic riding
organization. She loved horses and refused
to let her condition stand in the way of her
own riding. With perseverance, Terri
acquired a special saddle with extra back
support and a harness system to hold her in
place. She found a horse that was gentle and
would take care of her. And she started
riding, first in an arena, then outside.

Over time,
Terri’s rides became more adventurous, and
eventually she was taking solo trail rides
into the Cascade Wilderness. When asked why
she would do something that was risky for
any rider, but unthinkable for something
with her condition, her answer was filled
with emotion. “How can I make you understand
what it means to me,” she said, “a
completely dependent person, to ride alone
on a forest trail, to hear the sound of a
distant waterfall, and then to find it by
myself? Alone. Just my horse and me and the
waterfall.”

At five months
of age, Bridget McGrath was diagnosed with
infantile spasms, a seizure disorder. The
condition was stabilized with medication and
a program of physical therapy was started in
the hope that she would someday be able to
walk. By the age of two, still unable to
stand, Bridgette seemed to stop trying.
Equine-Assisted Therapy at the Somerset
Hills Handicapped Riding Center in New
Jersey made the difference.

Within six
months, Bridget could sit straight up in the
saddle, with the help of volunteers, and
grab a Hula-Hoop while trotting. Then speech
therapy began. At three, she spoke her first
words and today, at seven, she runs to the
stables, calling her horse’s name.

The value of
horses and riding for disabled individuals
has been recognized for centuries. The
ancient Greeks used horseback rides to cheer
the spirits of those considered untreatable
or incurable. An 1875 study in Paris
concluded that riding could lead to
improvements in posture, balance, joint
movement, muscle control and morale. Today
we understand why. When riding, the human’s
pelvis moves back and forth similar to the
way it does when crawling or walking. Riding
helps develop the muscles needed for
walking. Riding provides physical therapy
and motivation that is unmatched in
preparing a disabled child to someday walk.

The horse has
also been helpful in breaking through the
mysterious veil of autism. Children who have
been completely uncommunicative with the
world around them for years have responded
to the experience of being placed on the
back of a gentle therapy horse.

Worldwide,
organized therapeutic riding got its start
after Denmark’s Liz Hartel won a silver
medal for dressage in the 1952 Helsinki
Olympics. Although afflicted with polio,
Hartel had rehabilitated herself from
wheelchair to horseback and gone on to
riding excellence. By 1969, an organization
known as the North American Riding for the
Handicapped Association, or NARHA, had been
formed. There is no more respected and
beloved organization in America’s horse
industry today than NARHA and its hundreds
of local chapters. Corporations, clinicians
and the general public support them
generously.

It would not
be fair to claim that the revolution in
horsemanship is responsible for the rise of
modern therapeutic riding. They have
developed on parallel tracks over the past
three decades, yet they are highly
compatible and complimentary pursuits. The
primary difference is one of emphasis. With
therapeutic riding, improving the human is
the end goal. With natural horsemanship,
developing a partnership between horse and
human is the end goal, and improving the
human is a means of reaching that
goal.

Horsemanship
and rehabilitation intersect most
dramatically in the mustang-gentling
programs implemented by numerous prisons in
America. The Comstock Wild Horse Program
mentioned earlier is one example. The
Hutchinson Correctional Facility Wild Horse
Program in Hutchinson, Kansas is another.
This program’s motto, “Saving Horses –
Changing Men,” says it all. To participate
in this program of gentling and preparing
wild horses for auction, an inmate must put
pride and ego aside. He must learn to
control his emotions and his behavior. He
must work towards a long-term goal and delay
his gratification.

For an inmate,
the horse may represent the first totally
honest relationship in his life. The horse
does not lie. There is no ulterior motive in
the horse’s behavior. To be successful, the
inmate must be observant, look for the
smallest change and reward it. He must
prepare in advance, think ahead, and he must
provide rest and reward. Most of all he must
develop empathy, the ability to see the
world through another individual’s eyes, an
ability many in the correctional system have
never developed. As the inmate learns how to
develop the trust of a wild horse, he also
comes to trust that there is a better path
for his own life.

The revolution in horsemanship is a
revolution in relationships. Between horses
and people and the world in which they live.

Time

Impatience is a very
common human trait today. In our busy lives,
we are accustomed to looking for fast-acting
medications, timesaving products and
quick-start solutions. There is an
insidious, unspoken assumption in most of
what we do that this moment is not
worth savoring, that we should rush through
it to get to some more worthy moment that we
can and should savor. The problem for many
of us is that we never get to those truly
worthwhile moments.

Life is what
happens to us while we are waiting for it to
begin.

The horse
responds best to us when we slow down and
live in the moment with senses and minds
fully engaged. How long something takes
means nothing to a horse. Teachers of
horsemanship today often suggest that we
leave our wristwatches at home when we work
with our horses, and we are reminded with an
expression worthy of the great Yogi Berra,
to “take the time it takes and it will take
less time.”

Precious few
of us can ever completely dismiss the
element of time from our lives. But we can
certainly reduce our fixation on it. In
doing so, maybe we stop rushing quite so
much. Maybe we think about what we are doing
right now instead of what we need to do
next. Maybe we find joy in the living of
life instead of just getting to the finish
line. Maybe we learn how to enjoy the
journey. If so, we have the horse to thank
for that.

Why the
Revolution?

So there you
have it: a revolution in horsemanship.

This
revolution has certainly made it easier and
safer and more enjoyable for humans to
interact with horses for recreational
purposes. In our busy, stressful lives, that
would be enough to make it a significant
historical event. But we’ve seen that there
is something much more profound going on.
More than just the quality of our
recreation, this revolution has improved the
quality of our lives.

It has shown
us that the human being – every human being
– has so much farther he can go in his
growth. It has challenged us to try harder,
to think more clearly and to be more fully
realized human beings, more of what was
clearly intended for this species.

But why the
horse?

The horse is
the antithesis of the human being. It is the
ultimate prey to our ultimate predator.
There could be no more incompatible pairing
of species on the planet. And yet, we have
found that, when given the chance, the horse
completes us. It is the day to our night,
the hot to our cold, the light to our dark.
In terms our eastern brethren understand
better than we do, the horse is the yin to
our yang.

Perhaps this
is the reason that this revolution occurred.
To hand us a powerful tool for developing
the rest of our humanity, the part that
wasn’t genetically endowed, the part that,
in fact, goes against our genetically
endowed, predatorial instincts. The part we
have to work to obtain and is therefore most
valuable to us.

Who among us
would not agree that the world would be a
better place if our leadership was
benevolent, our purposes clear, our
intentions honorable, our behavior
consistent and our relationships empathetic?
This has been the message of countless
religious and social leaders throughout
history, and now it comes to us again
carried by an equine messenger, a former
beast of burden that is otherwise irrelevant
to modern life. It would not be the first
time that important truths were delivered by
an inauspicious messenger.

The horse was
on its way to becoming an historical
curiosity, something we read about in
history books or saw only in zoos. But it
came back in a wholly different way than
ever before. Maybe it came back to save us.

We all know
that there is something different and
special about horses. But perhaps it is
really that there is something different and
special about us when we’re with them. We
recognize in the horse a means to reach our
highest calling as humans. Perhaps that is
the real importance of this revolution in
horsemanship.